PDF Version of Issue #3

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

PDF Version of Issue #3 DARK MATTER: WOMEN WITNESSING #3 Editorial Lise Weil Kristin Flyntz PART I : EXTINCTION From The Lost Journals of Sacajewea Debra Magpie Earling After•Word Ghost Dance: the poems of Debra Magpie Earling Melissa Kwasny Dreams before Extinction Naeemeh Naeemaei Our Radiant Lives Deena Metzger Her Body is Burning Mary Sutton My Grandmother Said Netanyahu Naomi Shihab Nye Arrest Lena Khalaf Tuffaha Tree Holocaust Sara Wright Extinction Altars Beverly Naidus Turning Point Marilyn DuHamel Bear Requiem Susan Cerulean Our Safe Word Margo Berdeshevsky PART II : DEVOTION Serach bat Asher speaks Mei Mei Sanford First, a Mother: Interview with Megan Hollingsworth of ex•tinc•tion wit•ness Lise Weil Beauty from Brokenness: Interview with Lily Yeh Caroline Casey After•Word Our Call to Indigenous Consciousness: Taiaiake Alfred’s Wasáse Sharon English From the Beginning Nova Cynthia Anderson Calling out the Names Anne Bergeron Dark Matter: Women Witnessing - December, 2015 Issue #3 - EXTINCTION / DEVOTION PART II : DEVOTION (continued) Song of the Chesapeake Julie Gabrielli I am Nothing without my Dead Nora Jamieson After•Word Nora Jamieson’s Deranged Patricia Reis The Bone in My Yard: a Story-Carrier’s Path Rebecca Brams Listening to Natural Law: Interview with Ayya Santacitta Lise Weil After•Word Kenny Ausubel’s Dreaming the Future Courtney Cable Offerings Cynthia Travis Page 3 of 220 Editorial Issue #3. EXTINCTION/DEVOTION “The last one was killed in 1959, but there was no funeral and no one cried. I don’t know where his tomb is to put flowers on it. I can only wail and mourn his passing in my own way.” – Naeemeh Naeemaei For this issue of Dark Matter, we put out a call for material focusing on “devotion”—and yet much of what’s here also revolves around the theme of “extinction.” The paintings of Iranian artist Naeemeh Naeemaei are a stunning case in point. Other striking examples: Beverly Naidus’ extinction altars, Megan Hollingsworth’s work with ex•tinc•tion wit•ness, Sara Wright’s witnessing of her beloved trees in “Tree Holocaust.” In fact, extinction could be said to haunt most of the material in this issue—perhaps not surprising considering the journal’s mission, but also, as I came to realize, the intimate relationship between extinction and devotion, the way they are braided, the way one tends to nourish, inspire, give birth to the other. After all, this journal itself, which has been very much a devotional practice for its editors, was birthed by awareness of extinction. Installation artist Lily Yeh, interviewed in this issue, puts it this way: “…the beauty that moves comes from the broken dark places.” All this is to say that though we’ve divided the issue into two parts, “extinction” and “devotion,” almost every piece in it could go in either one. The words in the epigraph above refer to the Caspian Tiger, depicted in Naeemaei’s series Dreams of Extinction which appears in this issue. Her tiger is surrounded by weeping women who are giving him the proper ceremonial farewell he deserves. There’s an interesting parallel in Nora Jamieson’s recently published Deranged, reviewed in this issue, where a woman holds a funeral service for a coyote who was poisoned by her neighbour. She even puts an obituary notice in the paper: “Eastern Grey Coyote died on February 10th from an acute illness after suffering excruciating convulsions and suffocation.…She will be dearly missed by those she leaves behind, her family pack and Anna Holmes of Mountain Road who is holding calling hours on February 12th from 9p.m. to midnight.” I read somewhere that death rituals and ceremonies are what distinguish human from non-human animals. But to say this is to ignore the fact that there are also categories of human beings whose deaths go unacknowledged—by ritual, ceremony, or even markers. In “Ghost Dance: the Poetics of Loss,” also featured in this issue, Melissa Kwasny writes of the obscene disrespect for sites of Indian genocide in the U.S. “A bus driver smokes a cigarette in the parking lot at Sand Creek. The effect is devastating. The lack of monuments, plaques, or any sign of public recognition in some of these places bears witness to a total disregard for what happened, as well as to the people involved.” And in poems that for this reader evoke the almost 1,200 missing and murdered indigenous women here in Canada, until very recently stubbornly ignored by our government, Debra Earling writes of the disappearing of Dark Matter: Women Witnessing - December, 2015 Issue #3 - EXTINCTION / DEVOTION native women: “No one speaks about the woman/dying in the frail rising of a killing day./A woman hard- frozen in the field…” This journal arose in part out of my own distress over the horrific unprecedented loss of animal and plant life on this earth due to human activity. However the question of human extinction has never been far from my mind.* Two days after launching the first issue I was on a plane to Poland to spend five days in Auschwitz-Birkenau bearing witness with Zen peacemakers. On both of my trips to Auschwitz (this was my second) I met Palestinians who’d braved objections and sometimes rejection by friends and family to come and bear witness with us. I remember one of them saying he could no longer face these ruins every day, they were too much like the landscape he awoke to every morning at home (Palestinian poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha writes in this issue that what Palestinians have endured for decades is “a project of erasure that leaves no human being, olive tree, or square meter of land unscathed”). On one of the last days of this second trip to Auschwitz, I asked a young Palestinian woman what she would take home from this experience. She said: “At home we have no museums no monuments no archives, no way to remember our dead. I will create memorials.” The poems of Tuffaha and Naomi Shihab Nye in this issue are both asking questions about the politics of perception. Who gets seen? Acknowledged? “What does it mean,” Nye writes in “Netanyahu,” “when one person thinks/others deserve nothing? What is that called? If you know what it is called why keep/doing it?” In an interview in the Huffington Post about her recently published book Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, theoretical physicist Lisa Randall says something similar about the implications of dark matter for the nature of human perception. Though dark matter is not visible to the human eye, she writes, it’s “essential to the structure and formation of the universe.” This fact helps “to illuminate the gap between our limited observations and the many barely perceived phenomena that permeate our reality…Race and class differences call for empathy largely because of our difficulties in understanding what we can't experience or see, including the often hidden cultural forces that animate other people and their communities.” The “Black Lives Matter” movement had been in existence two years when Dark Matter was launched last November and it seemed to me at the time there was a strong subliminal connection between the two. Randall’s words make that connection explicit. In recognition of the fact that when it comes to erasure and extinction, the line between the human and the nonhuman animal is not always easy to draw, that there are categories of humans who are still treated like nonhuman animals (see Tuffaha’s poem “Arrest”), our focus broadens with this issue to include extinction in the human realm. Our primary dedication, however, continues to be to the more- than-human world that is bearing the brunt of our civilization’s industrial and technological success—a Page 3 of 218 fact that tends to be ignored by humans, even spiritually developed humans dedicated to social justice. In Auschwitz, my attempts to bring up the parallels to ecocide that kept presenting themselves to me were often met with indifference, if not resentment. (Which is why I was so happy to learn of Buddhist nuns who have taken on the issue of humans’ warped relationship to the earth – see my interview with Ayya Santacitta in “Listening to Natural Law.”) The astonishing inattention of the rest of the world is the driver of George Monbiot’s article in The Guardian about the “eco-apocalyptic fires” that have been raging across Indonesia since July: “The fires are destroying treasures as precious and irreplaceable as the archaeological remains being levelled by Isis, clouded leopards, sun bears, gibbons, the Sumatran rhinoceros and Sumatran tiger…” Monbiot writes that there are thousands or possibly millions more threatened species being driven from their habitat. The title of his article is “Nothing to See Here.” II. “…aching for—seeking a word, some word(s) that might bear what we are knowing, and what we are yet desperate for. Desperate for safety? For peace? For better memories? Of course. What word will make our lives safe? I’m trying, as you are—to find it.” – Margo Berdeshevsky The above words are from notes to the poem-collage “Our Safe Word” which appears in this issue. They, and the poem, were written by a poet who lives in Paris— and they were written before the Paris attacks in November. Often, the most important part of our knowing, as human beings, is not conscious. Is dark matter. Even consciously, it seems we all know a whole lot more than we did just over a year ago when the first issue of this journal came out—and much of “what we are knowing” often seems difficult if not impossible to bear.
Recommended publications
  • 2018 Celebrity Birthday Book!
    2 Contents 1 2018 17 1.1 January ............................................... 17 January 1 - Verne Troyer gets the start of a project (2018-01-01 00:02) . 17 January 2 - Jack Hanna gets animal considerations (2018-01-02 09:00) . 18 January 3 - Dan Harmon gets pestered (2018-01-03 09:00) . 18 January 4 - Dave Foley gets an outdoor slumber (2018-01-04 09:00) . 18 January 5 - deadmau5 gets a restructured week (2018-01-05 09:00) . 19 January 6 - Julie Chen gets variations on a dining invitation (2018-01-06 09:00) . 19 January 7 - Katie Couric gets a baristo’s indolence (2018-01-07 09:00) . 20 January 8 - Jenny Lewis gets a young Peter Pan (2018-01-08 09:00) . 20 January 9 - Joan Baez gets Mickey Brennan’d (2018-01-09 09:00) . 20 January 10 - Jemaine Clement gets incremental name dropping (2018-01-10 09:00) . 21 January 11 - Mary J. Blige gets transferable Bop-It skills (2018-01-11 09:00) . 22 January 12 - Raekwon gets world leader factoids (2018-01-12 09:00) . 22 January 13 - Julia Louis-Dreyfus gets a painful hallumination (2018-01-13 09:00) . 22 January 14 - Jason Bateman gets a squirrel’s revenge (2018-01-14 09:00) . 23 January 15 - Charo gets an avian alarm (2018-01-15 09:00) . 24 January 16 – Lin-Manuel Miranda gets an alternate path to a coveted award (2018-01-16 09:00) .................................... 24 January 17 - Joshua Malina gets a Baader-Meinhof’d rice pudding (2018-01-17 09:00) . 25 January 18 - Jason Segel gets a body donation (2018-01-18 09:00) .
    [Show full text]
  • Front Matter Winter 11
    Winter 2011 An online Journal of Voice BlazeVOX [books] Buffalo, NY BlazeVOX11 Winter 2011 Copyright © 2011 Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America Book design by Geoffrey Gatza First Edition BlazeVOX [books] 76 Inwood Place Buffalo, NY 14209 [email protected] publisher of weird little books BlazeVOX [ books ] blazevox.org 2 4 6 8 0 9 7 5 3 1 B l a z e V O X Table of Contents Poetry Sean Borodale Abigale Louise LeCavalier Alison Lyons Ambrielle Army Andrew Baron Avery Zaduk bruno neiva Changming Yuan Charles Wilkinson Curt Hopkins Simon Perchik Dave Migman Aviva Englander Cristy Deanna Rusek David McAleavey Matt Higdon Terry van Vliet Don Cozzette Dennis Etzel Jr. Emily Ho Ed Makowski Gonzalo Salesky Enola Mirao Iain Britton Dave Migman Jacqueline L. Jiang Chieu Ivan Jenson Jen Besemer Heller Levinson Julie Kovacs Jim Bennett Karlanna Lewis Julie Ellinger Hunt Kristi Nimmo Sarah Kosch Michael Kerszewsky minko terez Mattia Marino Margot Block Marcia Chicca Marthe Reed Purdey M. Kreiden Nils Norelius rob mclennan Pattabi Seshadri SPLV Richard Fox Shinwell Johnson Richard Cronshey W. M. Rivera Thomas Cochran Robin F. Brox Adam Fagin Matthew Walz Fiction: Philip Kobylarz Fishing for Television Michael Quinlan October 31, 2003 Michael C. Thompson Shadowless Jim Meirose Friendship Dolan Morgan A Spider’s Faith in Webs Anthony Johnson Outlast Abbi Nguyen The Foreign Dream Acta Biographia Winter 2011 Author Bios IntroductionIntroduction Occupy BlazeVOX Welcome to Winter! The snow is falling, finally, now in Buffalo.
    [Show full text]
  • “The Greatest Gift Is the Realization That Life Does Not Consist Either In
    “The greatest gift is the realization that life does not consist either in wallowing in the past or peering anxiously into the future; and it is appalling to contemplate the great number of often painful steps by which ones arrives at a truth so old, so obvious, and so frequently expressed. It is good for one to appreciate that life is now. Whatever it offers, little or much, life is now –this day-this hour.” Charles Macomb Flandrau Ernest Hemingway drank here. Cuban revolutionaries Fidel Castro and Che Guevera drank here. A longhaired young hippie musician named Jimmy Buffett drank and performed here, too. From the 1930’s through today this rustic dive bar has seen more than its share of the famous and the infamous. It’s a little joint called Capt. Tony’s in Key West, Florida. Eighty-seven-year-old Anthony ‘Capt. Tony’ Tarracino has been the owner and proprietor of this boozy establishment since 1959. It seems Tony, as a young mobster, got himself into some serious trouble with ‘the family’ back in New Jersey and needed to lay low for a while. In those days, the mosquito invested ‘keys’ (or islands) on the southernmost end of Florida’s coastline was a fine place for wise guys on the lam to hide out. And this was well before the tee-shirt shops, restaurants, bars, art galleries, charming B&B’s and quaint hotels turned Key West into a serious year-round tourist destination. Sure, there were some ‘artsy’ types like Hemingway and Tennessee Williams living in Key West during the late 50’s when Tony bought the bar, but it was a seaside shanty town where muscular hard-working men in shrimp boats and cutters fished all day for a living.
    [Show full text]
  • Youtube Nightstick
    Iron Claw - Skullcrusher - 1970 - YouTube Damon -[1]- Song Of A Gypsy - YouTube Chromakey Dreamcoat - YouTube Nightstick - Dream of the Witches' Sabbath/Massacre of Innocence (Air Attack) - YouTube Nightstick - Four More Years - YouTube Orange Goblin - The Astral Project - YouTube Orange Goblin - Nuclear Guru - YouTube Skepticism - Sign of the Storm - YouTube Cavity - Chase - YouTube Supercollider - YouTube Satin Black - YouTube Today Is The Day - Willpower - 2 - My First Knife - YouTube Alex G - Gnaw - YouTube Stereo Total - Baby Revolution - YouTube Add N To (X) Metal Fingers In My Body - YouTube 'Samurai' by X priest X (Official) - YouTube Bachelorette - I Want to be Your Girlfriend (Bored to Death ending credits) - YouTube Bachelorette - Her Rotating Head (Official) - YouTube The Bug - 'Fuck a Bitch' ft. Death Grips - YouTube Stumble On Tapes - Girlpool - YouTube Joanna Gruesome - Talking To Yr Dick - YouTube Joanna Gruesome - Lemonade Grrl - YouTube BLACK DIRT OAK "Demon Directive" - YouTube Black Dirt Oak - From The Jaguar Priest - YouTube alternative tv how much longer - YouTube Earthless - Lost in the Cold Sun - YouTube Electric Moon - The Doomsday Machine (2011) [Full Album] - YouTube CWC Music Video Holding Out For a Hero - YouTube La Femme - Psycho Tropical Berlin (Full Album) - YouTube Reverend Alicia - YouTube The Phi Mu Washboard Band - Love Hurts - YouTube BJ SNOWDEN IN CANADA - YouTube j-walk - plastic face (prod. cat soup) - YouTube BABY KAELY "SNEAKERHEAD" AMAZING 9 YEAR OLD RAPPER - YouTube Bernard + Edith - Heartache
    [Show full text]
  • Celebrates at 25 Music
    ARAB TIMES, MONDAY, JULY 26, 2021 NEWS/FEATURES 13 People & Places Music Crosby taps talented friends Shawhan displays commanding alto By Steven Wine enny Shawhan, “Don’t Be Afraid” (24 Angels/ JCoastal Bend Music ) Jenny Shawhan has a big voice and knows how to use it. “Let me soar,” she sings on her new album as she does just that. “Don’t Be Afraid” showcases the Denver-based Shawhan’s alto, a commanding, captivating instru- ment that conveys both strength and vulnerability, and can put on the twang. She wrote or cowrote all 10 tunes, and the theme is where need begins and ends. Several songs serve as a declaration of independence, including “I Do It for Me,” a tale of liberation and occasion- al libation. “Don’t You Tell Me What to Do” is a chip-kicker Shawhan sings with her fi st, and the power ballad “You Can’t Hurt Me Now” peaks with a dan- dy kiss-off line: “You never even knew me, and you re- ally missed out.” Best of all is Shawhan Shawhan’s sassy rendering of “Daddy’s Got a Briefcase,” a business story. John Macy produced, and there’s variety to ar- In this Aug. 22, 2019 fi le photo, Mick Jagger, (center), performs with his Rolling Stones bandmates, (from left), Ron Wood, Charlie Watts and Keith Richards during rangements elevated by his pedal steel, as well as their concert at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif. The Stones announced Thursday, July 22, that they will relaunch their US tour on Sept.
    [Show full text]